Love
by ProcrastinationQueen
Summary: Love is more than could ever be contained in a simple summary.
1. Will

Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing. You know the drill…

A/N: This is the first of seven 250 word mini-chapters, similar to my last submission (I thought love deserved a few additional words than helpless. Don't you agree?).

* * *

Will

Will loved three women. It wasn't complicated though, as he loved each in a different way.

He loved his mother with a strong devotion. The sacrifices she'd made to make a good life for him and his sister would never be forgotten. She'd often had to be both mother and father, and he knew he owed a large part of who he'd become to her. She was a wonderful woman, and he was proud to be her son.

His love for his wife was more intense than he could have ever imagined possible. She kept him grounded, kept him sane when the world wasn't. He knew he'd be lost without her. She was his everything and had given him everything, including three beautiful children. He didn't know how he'd ever gotten lucky enough to have her in his life, but he was grateful for her every day and fell deeper in love with her with each passing year.

His love for his daughter was nothing short of adoration. He loved his sons too, of course, but there was nothing more precious in the world than a little girl. He'd fallen in love the moment she'd been placed in his arms, and even now, that sweet face and those beautiful brown eyes could have him melted into a puddle in under three seconds. She was growing up, but she would always be his baby girl, and he was going to love being her daddy for as long as she'd let him.


	2. Grace

A/N: I had planned to post these in the same order as the last story, but I'll just post them as I write them and reorder the chapters later.

* * *

Grace

Grace loved a few people. A very few. But don't tell anyone. She has a reputation to protect.

Her grandmother is the one person she readily accepts hugs from and the only one she doesn't mind calling her Gracie. When she was little, she thought love smelled like a combination of the chocolate chip cookies that were always waiting in the kitchen and the perfume her grandmother wore. Even now, a cookie and a warm, loving hug from Nana could brighten her day.

She loves her parents, too. She argued with her father at every available opportunity, but she respected him, and his gentle smiles could still melt her heart just a little bit. She supposed the reason her mother's drinking hurt so much was because she loved her so much. Her reactions were usually more worry than anger, because even though her mom wasn't herself much of the time, Grace still wanted her around.

A couple others had wormed their way into her heart. She loved Adam like a brother. He'd been her best, and only, friend for so long. They understood each other in ways no one else did. She even loved Joan. She figured that out the day Joan collapsed at school when she was surprised to find that she was terrified of losing her friend.

And then there was Luke. She never planned to fall in like, let alone love. Was this love? It felt like a mental breakdown. But she thought she liked it anyway.


	3. Kevin

Kevin

When he was in high school, Kevin loved two things: baseball and girls. He loved the game of baseball itself, and he loved the attention and recognition he got from it from nearly everyone around him. It made him a star. He was never short on friends, or girls, when he was playing. And he definitely loved the girls, or maybe he just loved the fact that girls liked him, since he apparently had no trouble cheating on Beth even though he thought he'd been crazy about her. But everything changed one rainy night, and he discovered who really loved him in the aftermath as the friends and the girls fell away one by one.

Now, Kevin wasn't really sure that he even knew what love was. He knew there was much more to it than enjoying a sport or crushing on a cute girl. And looking back at how he acted with his family, friends, and the girls he'd dated, he realized that maybe his one true love had really been himself. Maybe he'd loved himself too much – to the extent that he hadn't left much room for anything else, or anyone else, and maybe that was partly why he'd been so miserable for so long after the accident.

He was learning, through a few metaphorical kicks in the rear, that it wasn't all about him. He was going to need to learn to open his heart, and that was going to make hitting a 90-mph fastball look easy.


	4. Helen

Helen

"Love is patient; love is kind…" Most of the time. Helen was surprised to find how it could bring out a ferocity in her that she never knew she possessed. She loved her husband so strongly and deeply that it frightened her sometimes, and she was frightened by any thought of losing him, whether to his work or to someone else. Normally, she wasn't really worried about the latter, but then Lucy Preston came along. But when push came to shove, she found she had no problem taking the devil by the horns and putting her in her place.

But the ferocity really came forth when her children were involved. She hated the way people looked at Kevin, either with stares of morbid fascination or pity. She wanted to scratch their eyes out for it. She just wanted people to treat him the same as everyone else. It was similar with Luke, when other kids rejected his attempts to fit in when he was younger and still made fun of him now. But it still amazed her how quickly she could morph into Mama Bear when she saw one of her babies hurting. Like when she wanted to throttle that little twit from yearbook who made Joan cry, or when she tore a strip off Price for serving her daughter another plateful of discouragement at a time when she didn't need any more.

Love might be patient and kind, but it would do battle when necessary. And so would she.


	5. Joan

Joan

Love was absolutely nothing like what she had always expected it to be. She had always envisioned being in love to consist of candy hearts, flowers, teddy bears and whispered sweet nothings. She never expected the confusion, pain, and frustration that walked hand in hand with the happiness it could bring. Love was like a mental illness. Love was way more complicated than driving a car. Love was a choice. Love was hard work beyond fantasy and dream. She had learned that love was all of these things and more, and that it could make her far crazier than Lyme Disease ever could.

Adam had been a surprise. He certainly didn't fit the mold of the boyfriend she'd always imagined she would have. If anyone had told her when she met him that she would fall in love with him, she'd have laughed. But he got her like no one else did, and her heart was his before either of them knew it. Then, on one horrible April day, they were over.

She realized absently that love and Adam each had four letters, two consonants and two vowels. It was fitting to find such similarities, since the two were linked in her mind and heart. She also found it fitting that both words were short, since it hadn't lasted. But that wasn't entirely true. Every day she would look at him and feel her heart turn over, because despite everything, she loved him still. And she knew she always would.


	6. Adam

Adam

For Adam, love and pain always seemed to go together, even though he didn't understand why. One was supposed to be good, and the other bad, but it baffled him how one could lead to the other and sometimes even seem to be one and the same. It was confusing as hell. And he would never understand how it was that you could hurt the ones you love the most, but he knew it was true.

He knew his mother had loved him, but she had hurt him terribly when she committed suicide. And he knew it wouldn't have hurt so much if he hadn't loved her as much as he did. And then there was Jane. He loved her in a way that he didn't know was possible before he met her. He also didn't know a girl could hurt him as deeply as she had when she wrecked his sculpture or all the times she shut him out. But he had hurt her deeply, too. Despite loving Jane more than anything, he slept with another girl. And he had done it partly to hurt her as much as she hurt him. He knew he would never be able to make any sense of that either.

Sometimes he thought it would be better not to love anyone or have anyone love him. But then he would think of his mother or Jane and realize that not having love led to far more pain than having it could ever bring.


	7. Luke

Luke liked for things to be logical, to make sense. It was part of the reason he became a scientist in the first place. He liked how things would fit into a logical pattern or could be explained by proven facts. Girls, though, and relationships with them, seemed to defy this at almost every turn.

His mother had told him once that sometimes relationships that work don't make sense, but he had a hard time accepting that until he came to realize it was true. He and Glynis had made sense. They had a similar background, outlook, and interests. In theory, their relationship should have worked magnificently. But in practice, it had crumbled after only a short while. His feelings for Grace had never made any sense, and he and Grace couldn't have seemed more different. But he loved her, and somehow their relationship worked almost in spite of itself.

But it still confused and unsettled him, to the point of making him feel like a complete stranger to himself. He still had a hard time wrapping his mind around things that weren't concrete and quantifiable. But he slowly began to consider the possibility that not everything had to be methodically examined or rationalized. He had told Kevin once that not everything was about sex, and his response had been that not everything was about science. And maybe he was right. Perhaps love should be enjoyed without examination, relished without rationalization, and allowed to just be what it was: wonderful.


End file.
